Facing the Wild Times: Cooperation, Collapse, and What It Means to Lead Now

Apocalyptic thinking usually doesn’t attract me, but yesterday, I still found myself adding Athena Akipis’s audiobook A Field Guide to the Apocalypse: A Mostly Serious Guide to Surviving Our Wild Times by Athena Aktipis to my Audible library.

Why? I’m not entirely sure yet.

Over the years, my work has increasingly centred around one pressing question: How do we lead ourselves, our organisations, and our systems in times of accelerating change, increasing complexity, and profound uncertainty to go beyond business as usual and co-create a better future?

From strategy rooms to leadership retreats, I’ve watched many leaders struggle to find footing in this ‘new normal’ amid seemingly unrelenting waves of change and disruption. And rightly so. We are living through a time that feels civilisational in its implications. And perhaps it is.

Historians and theorists like Joseph Tainter and Arnold Toynbee remind us that civilisations don’t fall from external threats alone but from within—when they fail to respond creatively to new and growing challenges.

Today, we face a cascading poly-crises (or even a meta-crisis)—from climate instability and ecological overshoot to AI disruption, political polarisation, and fraying social contracts. These aren’t isolated issues; they are symptoms of deeper systemic issues and misalignments. And yet, despite the gravity of our moment, I find myself surprisingly hopeful.

That hope is strangely enough reinforced as I listen to Athena Aktipis’ audiobook. It’s not your everyday academic bible, but rather “a weird, weirdly encouraging book from a scholar who understands the risks of volcanoes, killer robots, militarised pathogens, space aliens, nuclear weapons, wildfires and the greenhouse effect.”

A (Mostly Serious) Guide to the End of the World

Athena Aktipis is a psychologist, evolutionary biologist, and expert in cooperation science. She teaches at Arizona State University and leads research on human generosity and resilience. She’s also the host of the podcast Zombified and a passionate science communicator who believes that collaboration—not conflict—is humanity’s greatest survival skill.

Her book takes a different approach to the very real threats we face. Rather than descend into doom or armchair survivalism, she invites us to see the apocalypse not just as an ending but as a transformation—a portal, a threshold.

With a sharp scientific mind and playful—even silly—spirit, she weaves together insights from evolutionary psychology, game theory, neuroscience, and history to remind us of something essential: we have always been adaptive, social, and surprisingly resilient creatures.

Some highlights from her field guide:

– Build your survival team—not just with skills, but with trust and diversity.

– Pack a ukulele—because joy, creativity, and play are part of what make us human.

– Don’t go it alone—because cooperation, not isolation, is what actually gets us through.

Aktipis explores everything from volcanoes and rogue AI to pandemics and nuclear war—but does so with a tone of “radical optimism.” Not naive positivity, but a grounded belief in our ability to evolve, together.

Her risk management advice is especially practical: assess threats from multiple perspectives, seek diverse information, collaborate across disciplines, and know when to stop gathering information and act. Her ultimate message? Survival is not just technical—it’s emotional, social, and cultural.

Listening to the audiobook version, I sometimes find the author’s joyous and silly tone a bit annoying, especially considering the seriousness of the topic. On the same note, a journalist interviewing her for Cambridge Day asked her: “With such a serious subject, what made you opt to use a nonserious tone throughout?”

The author’s answer provided an opportunity to view our circumstances from a different lens:

“Catastrophe can just be inherently scary in a way that makes people withdraw, and that has a lot of consequences. It makes it harder for people to engage with others and therefore harder to learn or share information that might be important. I wanted to create an accessible and playful tone that would invite people to approach the challenges we’re facing without a sense of dread or helplessness. I’m encouraging people to lean into morbid curiosity… we are very curious about things that are scary or dangerous, and that makes good evolutionary sense, because we want to be prepared. People will voluntarily go to haunted houses or horror movies just to scare themselves, and that’s fun for them. Not that my book is a horror book, but it’s an invitation to have a more playful and exploratory attitude about the challenges that we may be facing in the future. I talk a lot about the zombie apocalypse, because I see that as a good tool for considering how to be prepared for disasters; it doesn’t feel as overwhelming as thinking about an earthquake or a tornado. By asking the questions through a zombie apocalypse lens, you still get the real answers.”

The journalist continued by asking why she wrote the book. The author answered: “I was seeing a lot of general anxiety, especially among younger people, about what is happening in the world and what’s going to happen. Those people feel like everything is horrible, and that becomes very overwhelming and can be almost paralysing. On the other hand, there are people who are in denial, being like ‘Let’s pretend that everything is fine and great, we don’t have to worry.’ I saw a third way that I thought was a lot better: to embrace that a lot of things are messed up, and to embrace the fact that we’re actually pretty good at dealing with issues and solving problems and doing so in a collective way. For over a decade, my Human Generosity Project has been looking at how people cooperate in small-scale societies and, in particular, how they help each other in times of need. We’ve seen that people are very generous, especially when needs arise due to unpredictable and uncontrollable challenges, and they often help each other without expecting anything in return.”

What These Times Ask of Us

Listening to the audiobook as a strategist, coach, and mother (despite its occasional silliness on such a grave topic) I am again reminded that these times ask something different of us. Not just to endure but to evolve.

As leaders, we are called to build cultures and strategies that are resilient, regenerative, and future-fit.

As parents, we are invited to nurture wisdom, creativity, and compassion in the next generation.

And as future ancestors, we are challenged to think seven generations ahead—asking not just what we are doing but who we are becoming.

Ultimately, the audiobook A Field Guide to the Apocalypse: A Mostly Serious Guide to Surviving Our Wild Times by Athena Aktipis is less about disaster preparedness and more about rediscovering what makes us human: connection, creativity, and cooperation.

That, my friends, makes me hopeful!

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You can listen to a short (11 min) YouTube clip from the audiobook here (beware of the first noisy minute):

Elisabet Lagerstedt

Elisabet Lagerstedt is the founder and director of Future Navigators. As a trusted advisor, consultant, and Executive Coach, she helps business leaders navigate beyond business as usual to build Better Business and co-create a better future - through insight, strategy, innovation, and transformation. Elisabet is also the author of Better Business, Better Future (2022) and Navigera in i Framtiden (2018).